


it's made of cracks and photographs

by Mx_Carter



Category: Original Work
Genre: Christmas, F/F, Fluff, Friendship, Light to Medium Angst, Love, Mental Illness, Obsession, Superheroes, Supervillains, Therapy, bc im not a complete monster, bc this is me and im awful, its all a bit of a mess really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 01:26:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9100396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mx_Carter/pseuds/Mx_Carter
Summary: “Do you remember the first time someone told you the world was spinning?”
    And if being cruel is a choice, then you can always, always make a different choice.  At Christmas, a hero and a villain reflect.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blueberryfallout](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueberryfallout/gifts).



> This is primarily a Christmas present for my dear friend catsaremyboyfriend. We made OCs together ages ago, and when I asked her what she wanted for Christmas she told me to write about them, knowing I would make it into angst somehow. Therefore any angst is entirely her fault, and she cannot blame it on me. This has been a disclaimer.  
> Cats, I'm sorry its like 4 days late, and I hope I've done our babies justice. Love ya so, so much. As ever, there's not a whole lot I could have done without you.  
> I've included notes about the characters and their various costumes, abilities etc. at the end if you want to skip down and read them.  
> Title from Not Perfect by Tim Minchin

_Robert Hope Psychiatric Hospital, Christmas Eve_

“So yesterday, you were telling me about your childhood nightmares.”

Mahmood has been working with Saoirse Flynn for more than a year now, long enough to know that you don't work with Saoirse Flynn so much as you have long and fascinating chats with Saoirse Flynn, and if she ever decides that you're talking down to her, or that you're trying to actually do your job, those chats will turn into discussions of the darker aspects of your home life, or perhaps of the many and varied ways to kill someone while you're handcuffed.

Or, at least, that’s how it was before September.

While Mahmood doesn’t know all the details – mostly because only Saoirse and the hero known as Space Out know all the details, and partially because Saoirse has requested that she be the one to fill him in – he knows it was bad. Bad enough to land his patient in Intensive Care for two months, bad enough that she’s still in a wheelchair. Spinal damage, the doctors had said, among other things. She would make a full recovery – Saoirse Flynn is young and healthy, in body if nothing else – but it will take time.

Saoirse doesn’t seem to mind the wheelchair much, and has no complaints about her aches and pains. But there has most definitely been something off about his patient since she returned to the tender bosom of the Hope at the start of December. A sort of…contemplation, an inwards-facing demeanour. Normally Saoirse vacillated between avid, viper-like concentration on her surroundings and total blankness, but nowadays, she’s generally just _present._ Sitting quietly wherever she wheels or is wheeled, eating and showering and sleeping and being perfectly cooperative, her movements fluid and natural in a way they aren’t when she shuts down, but always a little absent-minded. Like she’s working through a complex math problem in her head.

Before September, Mahmood would be anticipating an escape attempt, but Saoirse doesn’t have any interest in escaping. Something he knows because Saoirse actually _told_ him, with _words,_ during one of their sessions. The sessions that she appears, in a strangely awkward, fumbling manner, to be trying to _productively use_.

Mahmood couldn’t have imagined using the word awkward to describe anything about the graceful, clinically exact, hyperfocused snake of a woman he’s been trying to treat, but it is most certainly there. Saoirse speaks in fits and starts now, jumping confusingly – confusedly – from one train of thought to another, dropping a metaphorical bomb and then glancing up through her lashes to see how it’s been received. She seems almost unsure of herself, which is possibly the strangest thing about this whole…whatever it is. Saoirse Flynn never used to be anything so pedestrian as unsure. Even when wrong, she’d barrelled forward with all the confidence of someone seriously considering suicide. She’d never paused in her speech except for dramatic effect, never looked through her lashes except when being coy.

This woman, shave-headed and cool-eyed, perched across the table from him, is entirely a different kind of person. Whatever happened to her in the warehouse on Westhaven St, it must have been life-shattering.

Saoirse’s voice breaks Mahmood out of her thoughts – it’s soft, still accented but mostly free of any affected lilts and oddnesses. “I don’t find myself wanting to talk about my old nightmares, Doctor.”

“What do you want to talk about then?” Mahmood asks, the adrenaline rush of _finally, we’re getting somewhere!_ slightly dampened from the first few sessions since September, but still very much there.

There is silence for a few minutes, as she turns something over in her mind. Mahmood tries very hard not to hold his breath, and mostly succeeds.

“Do you remember the first time someone told you the world was spinning?”

He gives this a good thought before answering. These sorts of nonsensical asides and subject changes are typical enough that he’s used to them, and knows they generally lead in more sensible places that one would first assume.

“I think so, maybe. Why do you ask?”

“What did it feel like?” Saoirse is leaning forward slightly in her seat, the old familiar fire sparking in her gaze, and it’s only long hours of exposure to this fire at full, face-scorching height that stops him flinching back from it.

“I didn’t believe it. It seemed…stupid, I suppose. I couldn’t see how the Earth could be rotating when everything was so stationary.”

For a second, the not-so-professional part of him freaks out, but from the way Saoirse leans back in her wheelchair a moment later, a blank and slightly shocked look on her face, he probably said the right thing.

“What do you do,” Saoirse says, as if to herself, “when someone tells you that everything you believed was wrong? That the core belief that you built your world on was inherently wrong? What to do when they show you proof, when you prove it for yourself, in that moment when you know you are wrong, you were always wrong, wrong wrong wrong _wrong_ –“

She breaks off, suddenly, and drops her head into her hands. Long, pale fingers drag across the patchwork of old burn scars and ginger stubble covering her scalp. Quite suddenly, Mahmood realises that what he has been observing these past few weeks has been nothing other than a very scared, very deadly person in complete freefall.

This is Sweetheart, terror of Metroville, murderer and torturer and poisoner and mad chemist and unrepentant villain, cracking open.

The thought sends a shiver down his spine, like being locked in a cage with a wounded tiger. In her…well, not exactly her right mind, but close enough for government work, Saoirse wouldn’t kill him without provocation or extreme boredom. But if she’s losing herself this badly, she might lash out, just because. To feel like herself again, to assert her control over her situation, to justify her actions or the actions of others against her.

While Mahmood hasn’t been overtly analysing his patient, for fear of the various cruelties Saoirse dishes out to psychologists who displease her, he’s aware that the persona called Sweetheart is just that. It’s a disorder seen in a good portion of costumes, both heroic and villainous – you make yourself into something bigger than a person, something better, something scarier. If you are the personification of strength, how can you be weak? If you fill your mind with evil and darkness and poison, then you don’t have to care about the things that were done to you, or the lives you take, or the consequences of any of your actions. If you are more than a single human, you don’t have to be human, and any of the weaknesses, faults and emotions that come with humanity don’t have to apply to you.

Saoirse refuses to answer to anything other than Sweetheart, she always has. She won’t tolerate any prying into her life before she donned her costume, and once told a doctor who tried to push that edict, just before slitting his throat ear to ear, “I am Sweetheart. There’s no one else in here. There’s no one left to save.”

For someone so complex and confusing, it’s almost disappointingly textbook.

If she loses sight of her persona, of the person she has invented for herself to be, she will lose any sense of her purpose or place in the world. That could cause anything from a suicide attempt to a mass homicide attempt, and knowing how resourceful Saoirse is, these attempts are highly likely to succeed.

Mahmood pushes the sudden fear aside. He’ll think more about that later – right now, he has a patient to attend to.

“Are you going to tell me what you think you were wrong about?”

“I jumped off the roof of a warehouse because I thought nothing was real.”

It’s said in a matter of fact tone, as if she’s narrating a visit to the shops. Mahmood blinks at her, stunned for a moment. Thankfully his participation isn’t needed right now.

“She told me not to, sweet thing that she is. Begged me, even. I felt a little bad – she looked like I’d threatened to stab her – but I had to. I was trying to prove something to her, see.” She lapses into silence again, staring at the wall as if she could bore holes through it with her eyes.

‘She’ is obviously Space Out, the only other person present in the warehouse and, to Mahmood’s knowledge, the only person who could make Saoirse feel bad about anything. Feeling a little light-headed, he prompts “What were you trying to prove to her?”

“That I was right,” Saoirse says, still staring at the wall. “You see, I had this theory. I’ve had it for a while. Solipsism. Dissociation, you’d probably call it. Nothing felt real for such a very long time, so who says it is? Who says anything is? Senses lie, and people lie, and you can’t trust anything except your own mind, rational or irrational as it is. And my mind was telling me very persuasively that I was the only real thing in the whole wide world.”

It makes sense, Mahmood thinks breathlessly. It’s something he’s suspected for a while. Saoirse’s complete disregard for pain and peril, both hers and other’s. Her theatrics, as if she believes herself to be constantly in a play, where she is the main character and everything and everyone else is just set design.  With one notable exception, of course.

“What about Space Out?”

Saoirse laughs, and it sounds strangled and longing. “Space Out. The only other real person in this little world, and she just so happened to despise me.”

“So you were trying to prove that the world wasn’t real?”

“Yep. If everything’s only carboard and tissue, then the floor’s just one of those big bouncy castles they have for stunt doubles to fall on. Other people get hurt, of course, but I obviously was not other people. Therefore, I would jump off the roof and be fine, and she’d understand.” That was definitely longing on her face. “She would finally understand.”

“I have to ask, was everything you’ve done to make her understand your point of view?”

Her face morphs into something half contemplative, half sly. “Not everything. Most of it was just fun.”

Right. Yes. It’s easy, sometimes, of Mahmood to forget that some of the people he’s treating can be genuinely cruel. Saoirse may be legally considered unable to differentiate between moral and immoral, but she’s still a sadist.

“That implies that some of it was an attempt to persuade her.”

“Well, yes.” She’s quiet for another few moments. Like a Pinter play, Mahmood thinks distractedly. Full of dramatic pauses. “Obviously, it didn’t work.”

She tells him the story, in fits and starts, looking fixedly at the wall as if pretending this isn’t happening. Tells him how Space Out tracked her down again, in response to a spate of poisonings in Midtown.

“It was me,” she says, “but just a test run. Nothing big. Obviously, my darling was paying attention.” She looks, for a moment, purely delighted.

According to Saoirse, Space Out had been ‘grumpy’. Mahmood translates this to mean that she was overtired, or overworked, or overwrought, or a combination. They’d fought, exchanged words sharper than normal, and eventually Space Out had screamed “Why?” at her. “She asks me that a lot, but this time, I was tired, and I decided to answer.”

So Saoirse had gone up to the roof, given a little speech, and jumped.

“As I’m sure you’ve figured out, there wasn’t any handy bouncy castles. I think I did bounce a little way, but it’s all a bit of a blur.”

Space Out had called an ambulance, and Saoirse had been taken into custody. “By that point I was all the way down the rabbit hole. The last thing I remember before waking up in a hospital bed is her leaning over me. She had her visor up.” This last sentence is said with so much reverence the words seem to shiver.

After that, the silence stretches out into minutes, while Mahmood puts the pieces together. If Saoirse has sustained grievous injuries in her fall, then the world must be real. And if the world is real, then every terrible thing she’s done has had real impact. Sadistic she may be, but Mahmood has met far worse. Saoirse murders and harms and experiments and all the time laughs and jokes and revels in it, like it’s a game, and he is only now realising that perhaps it always was, for her. Perhaps she’s only now realising that no one else was playing.

Or perhaps she’s simply trying to reconcile the evidence with a delusion she’s accepted as gospel truth for years. It really is impossible to tell.

“I think,” he says finally, weighing each word very carefully, “the question is, what do you believe now?”

“I don’t know,” Saoirse says, and then looks up suddenly. “Is it Christmas Eve today?”

Mahmood can’t help but smile at that. “Yes,” he tells her, “it is.”

“Well,” she says, one of her rare, human smiles flickering on her face, “fancy that! Christmas Eve.”

Then, quieter, “I believe, after quite a lot of thinking and arguing and confusion and backtracking, and other such nuisances, that I am wrong. That the world is real, and everyone in it too. I believe I’ve had far too much proof –“ here, she gestures down at her wheelchair, expression rueful in a way he’s never seen from her before – “to believe otherwise. And after three months, l believe that’s sunk all the way in, and I won’t be changing my mind any time soon. As for the rest...I don’t know, Doctor. I do think I’d like to find out, thought.”

Maybe she’s feeding him a line, maybe she’s lulling him into a false sense of security so she can strangle him to death, maybe she’ll be back to how she was tomorrow. But Mahmood finds a smile stretching over his lips, almost without permission, and reflects that for someone who doesn’t celebrate Christmas, he appears to be experiencing a bit of a Christmas miracle.

“Well,” he says, “in that case, what would you like to talk about now?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

_Somewhere Downtown, Christmas Day_

Emily’s great aunt and her Nana are over for Christmas, and Grandma is with her mom’s brother. Which is nice, because she’s getting the whole Christmas family vibe minus almost all the racism. Mama has made some of her Christmas Special Hot Chocolate, which she now knows is just the normal lovely chocolate, which she makes by melting squares of chocolate into the milk, with a candy cane melted in. And whipped cream on top, of course. The food is great and plentiful, their little kitchen is warm and filled with laughter, her moms clubbed together and got her all the comics she’s been regretfully ignoring in an attempt to save money, and all in all it’s a lovely Christmas. So when her comm, the little unit used by all Metroville heroes to coordinate themselves and made by someone in a basement, like most of their tech, goes off, she’s expecting the worst.

But when she ducks out of the kitchen to take the call, it’s just the Rambler. “Meet me on our roof,” he tells her, voice as sandpaper hoarse as ever, “not an emergency, just thought we should catch up. I brought cookies.”

“Well, in that case,” she says, and she knows him well enough to sense his smile.

She makes her excuses – a friend wanted to take a break from her family’s celebrations, she’ll be back shortly – and Nana is extolling on what a good girl she is, to be such a good friend when she leaves, her costume and some other items in a duffel. She changes in the restrooms of the second nearest subway station to her home – she uses them a lot, because one of the cubicles has a little window above it she can slip out of onto street level, and it’s much harder to track someone entering a restroom and leaving in a CCTV blind spot than it is to track someone leaving an apartment building from three stories up. Once she’s out she clips on her rollerblades and skates off through the streets to their rooftop.

Their rooftop is nice and flat, nestled between three of the relatively few high-rises in Metroville so it doesn’t get so many puddles, and with no way to access it from the inside, which is rare but the reason why it’s their rooftop. She looks up to see that Rambler’s already there – and she’s damned if she knows how he gets up there on his own when his powers are purely psychological and he doesn’t trust grapples or anti-grav tech – sitting with his legs dangling over the edge, a plastic container of cookies and a thermos with two cups sitting next to him. When he sees her he smiles, waves, and pats the roof beside him. She grapples up the building, landing gracefully through long practice, and settles in, taking off her treasured astronaut helmet. There’s a domino underneath it, so she’s alright.

The thermos is full of eggnog, the good stuff, and the cookies are spiced with your general Christmas spices and just a hint of chilli, because Rambler really cannot help himself. They sit in silence, like they normally do, and watch the cars go by below them. This street is nice enough to have Christmas lights on the streetlights, and it’s already dark enough for them to be on. For the first time since the warehouse on Westhaven St, she registers, she is perfectly calm.

Rambler has been tapping patterns into the roof since she arrived, but they’ve been slowing down, and he’s almost come to a stop. Emily is about ninety percent sure this is a Bad Day, the type where his hallucinations just won’t quit and the world feels like it’s all sharp teeth and plots against him. She knows he takes meds, and she also knows that meds don’t always, one hundred percent, help. Still, he’s calmer now. They both like each other’s company on bad days – too many firefights, too many dangerous and stupid situations that two rag-tag home-grown untrained part-timers should not have been able to walk out of, have brought them together so close they’re practically joined at the hip whenever they’re in costume. She doesn’t know his name and he doesn’t know hers – he insists it’s safer that way, he has a Thing about secret identities which she suspects is only slightly because of the paranoia – but she’d swear he was the brother she’s never had. It’s no weirder than anything else she’s done since she realised what she could do.

Once she’s finished with her cookie she reaches into her duffle, rummaging to find the present she’d wrapped for him. She passes it over and he doesn’t say thank you, but he does unwrap it carefully, getting his perpetually gloved fingers under the tape and levering it up slowly.

She’d knitted him a scarf, bright warm colours to contrast with his shitty black suit and white shirt ensemble, and show off the warm brown tones in his skin. And to cover his neck, of course. He tries to hide it, but she knows he gets cold. After holding it in his hands for a long moment he winds it around his neck and tucks the edges in. Then he passes her present over. It’s got an envelope taped to the front and she opens that first.

She shrieks in shock and delight as glitter poofs out of the envelope and spills all over her. “Did you just glitter-bomb me?”

Rambler smirks at her. “As if you’d notice any more sparkles on that ridiculous costume.”

“Hey,” she wags a finger at him, accidentally flicking glitter that he _recoils_ from, strange man, with a look of abject distaste. Well, jokes on him, if he couldn’t take the heat he should have stayed out the kitchen. “My costume is _classy_. Girls love it.”

“In your dreams, Princess Sparkle Pony,” and she’s almost tempted to throw glitter at him, but she’s not a monster. She is _not_ Princess Sparkle Pony, whatever the hell one of those is. She just likes glitter and galaxy patterns, all of which fits with her aesthetic, so.

“Rude, Rambler, very rude,” she tells him loftily, then sets to unwrapping her present. It’s been packed into a little cardboard box, and she struggles with the tape for a minute, to her friend’s amusement, before finally getting it open.

Inside, nestled in tissue paper and bubble-wrap, is a little blown-glass statue of a bull. Emily recognises it after a minute – she’d stopped to admire on their patrol three weeks ago, where it was sitting in the window of a battered little antique shop. It’s a strange sort of translucent purple-black, and spotted through with little flecks of silver, reminding her strongly of stars. It’s eyes are bright gold foil, and next to the dark glass they look like they’re glowing. A little space bull, she’d called it, before being distracted by angry shouting a couple of blocks away. She runs a finger over it with reverence.

People don’t like Rambler, as a rule. He’s very quiet when he’s not doing his thing, and when he is…most people find psychic powers way more unnerving than, say, super strength or shape-shifting, and even Rambler admits that his is a bit creepy. That always annoys her, because he’s honestly one of the best friends she’s ever had, for all that they don’t talk much. He can be so stupidly thoughtful. She thanks him, and he offers her another cookie. They sit in peaceful, companionable silence for a bit.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Rambler’s rusty voice breaks into her contemplation, and she reflects for a moment how different it sounds when he’s doing his thing, how much smoother, “how are you holding up?”

That surprises her. As a rule, the two of them don’t talk about feelings much. She knows he sees a therapist, though how that works she has no idea, and she…copes, alright? She is coping, and fine, and all the times she’s cried in the shower don’t count. Showers are liminal spaces, okay, nothing that happens in them counts.

“What’s this about?”

“Sweetheart,” he says in _Seriously? This is obvious_ tones. “Who else?”

Emily has a bit of a think.

Sweetheart…it’s a mess. It’s always a mess. Whatever they have between them is part her nemesis’s obsession and part Emily’s seemingly bottomless ache to help, in any way she can, and part those quiet moments when they’re both exhausted and tired of fighting each other, when they have honest to god conversations and Emily can forget that this is a woman with a kill count that hit double digits last year, who does not seem to actually care about anyone or anything –

Except Emily.

One time, Sweetheart fell in with one of those villains who’s basically just a criminal who thought a mask would give him some glamour. The man turned out to be a people smuggler, specifically children, one of those people who don’t end up in Metroville too often. In one of those rare moments of morality she only seems to get around children and small animals, Sweetheart gave him a combination hallucinogenic and paralytic, one of the ones she invents and manufactures herself and sometimes makes half-hearted attempts to patent, and left him trussed up at a police station. She’d covered him head to toe in galaxy stickers.

One time, Sweetheart stuck her with something that paralysed her from the neck down, then carried her up to the roof to watch the stars – they’d been on the edge of the city, so there wasn’t so much light pollution – and they’d talked about aliens because what the hell else was there to do, and when the paralytic started wearing off Sweetheart helped her drink some water, put her in the recovery position, used her comm to alert Rambler, then scarpered.

One time, Sweetheart kissed her.

One time, she kissed Sweetheart.

One time, the fucking Meat Grinder shot her in the stomach, and Sweetheart stayed with her and called an ambulance. She didn’t even leave when the paramedics showed up, rode the ambulance to the hospital and refused to leave it until Emily had come out of surgery. Then she went quietly, and stayed in the Hope until Emily was back on the streets again. She didn’t pull anything until three weeks after that.

They had a system. Sweetheart broke out, went completely off the radar, then got bored and did something. Sometimes it involved murder, sometimes not. Emily tracked her down, they fought, sometimes Sweetheart got away and sometimes she didn’t. Eventually, however long it took, Emily would pin her down long enough to bring her in, and she’d go back to the Hope.

Then Sweetheart jumped off a building in front of Emily, all to prove some stupid _point_ which, by the way, Emily still doesn’t understand, and now she doesn’t know what the fuck’s happening.

 Sweetheart is still in the Hope. According to Dr Saif she’s…different, somehow. It seems like she’s actually trying, instead of just treating the Hope as her personal vacation home. She may not break out again, even when she can.

She may actually be trying to put all her broken bits and pieces back together again.

What she’ll end up with, Emily doesn’t know. She wants to, she wants to so much. There’s a tiny, screaming, _horrible_ part of her which keeps going _Will she still want me? Will she still care about me? Will she even be able to stand the sight of me?_ which she’s trying very hard to ignore, but she’s not counting that bit.

She used to hate Sweetheart. Really, properly hate her. Where did it all go so wrong?

Emily takes a deep breath, the winter air searing her nose, the taste of her friend’s eggnog thick in her mouth. She remembers what Dr Saif said to her, the last time they talked, less than a week ago. They have an agreement, in which he lets her know how Sweetheart is doing inside the Hope – as much as he can, without breaking doctor-patient confidentiality – and she lets him know how she’s doing outside it.

“She’s trying,” he’d told her, as he sipped the coffee she’d grabbed for him. “She’s telling me things, from before Sweetheart, even. I think, whatever happened between you two, it’s made her re-evaluate things. Obviously, it’s hard to tell, but she might actually want to get better.”

“Do you know,” Emily says, staring at the cars moving below them, the groups of people laughing as they wander down the street. It’s just started snowing, while she was thinking, big fluffy white flakes that drift down from the dark sky like the benediction of some kind god, like fluffy little duck feathers borne on the wind. When she was a kid, Mama used to tell her that snowflakes were feathers from the wings of angels. “Do you know, I think I’m holding up just fine.”

The thing is, Emily believes in healing and Christmas miracles, and the endless potential for good in the human soul. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be Space Out. The thing is, Sweetheart is not a lost cause because no one is ever a lost cause, not even the very worst. The thing is, being cruel is a choice, and anyone who says otherwise is fooling themselves. And if being cruel is a choice, then you can always, always make a different choice.

Maybe Sweetheart will make a different choice, maybe she’ll just carry on being the her that Emily knows and fights. Either way, Emily has her family, and her civilian friends, and Rambler, and plenty of other people; therefore, whatever Sweetheart decides to do, she will probably survive it.

“Good,” Rambler says, and then leans out to catch a snowflake on his tongue. Another lands on his nose, and he makes a face as it melts. Emily smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> Saoirse Flynn, aka Sweetheart: Genius biochemist, Irish immigrant and occasional murderer, whose motive appears to be entirely "Wouldn't that be fun!" Wears big, poofy dresses, elaborate curled wigs and stylised little-girl makeup, and has at least five different controlled substances on her at all times. Has a Thing for Space Out.
> 
> Emily Clarke, aka Space Out: Street-level hero and The Rambler's partner, whos costume involves glittery roller-skates, copious galaxy prints, a much-loved astronaut helmet and her baseball bat. Can confuse people, ranging from lightly dazed to full-on vertigous, with her mind. Has a Thing for Sweetheart.
> 
> The Rambler, name unknown: Street-level hero and Space Out's partner, who can literally talk people into doing anything he wants them to. It's weird and kind of creepy, but he's actually a lovely person so it's okay. Probably has a Dark Past. Definitely does not have a Thing for Sweetheart, and thinks Space Out could do much better.


End file.
